Twenty-Two

Bonnie went alone to the hospital Saturday night. I would have accompanied her, but Rachel couldn't be left on her own, and it was, after all, Bonnie's sister. She promised to text updates on Marta's condition as they became available.

What I learned, over the next few hours, was that Marta had been doing a one-woman stakeout trying to get a lead on who might have sold fentanyl to the mother of Bonnie's student who had overdosed. Someone had hit her in the head as she stood by her car and she'd briefly lost consciousness. A couple coming out of Jim's, the bar Marta had been keeping an eye on, saw her and called 911. Marta was awake by the time the ambulance arrived, and tried without success to talk them out of taking her to the hospital.

Good thing, too.

She was diagnosed with a mild concussion. A doctor conducted several neurological tests and to be on the safe side Marta was kept until they could do a CT scan much later that evening. Bonnie had stayed at the hospital with Ginny, who was, according to Bonnie, a complete wreck, until the results of the scan were available, which was well after midnight. The scan did not show anything alarming, but the ER staff decided it would be best to keep Marta there at least until the morning.

I tried to stay awake until Bonnie got home, waiting up for her in the living room, but when she came through the door shortly before two, I was out cold in the recliner. The sound of her entry woke me. We had a brief chat, and then we both went to bed. If she was still angry about my selling the boat to Jack, she was too tired to show it.

Around nine Sunday morning, Bonnie texted Ginny for news. Marta was to be discharged around eleven, and had asked Ginny to bring her a pair of shoes. The ones she'd been wearing when she was assaulted had been stolen right off her feet.

Bonnie said she would drop by later. When she went, Rachel and I joined her, stopping along the way to buy flowers and pick up some chocolate croissants from Marta's favorite bakery.

She was sitting on their front porch, feet up, sipping on some lemonade and reading a Scott Turow novel when we pulled into the driveway. Marta didn't much want to talk about what had happened to her, at least not in front of all of us. Rachel and I spent some time in the kitchen with Ginny so that the sisters could talk privately. And when Rachel mentioned her newfound interest, Ginny offered to take her on a tour of their backyard garden to see what specimens they might be able to find.

That left me alone for a few minutes in the kitchen, affording me time to ponder my current predicament, not that I wasn't already thinking about it all the time. I got out my phone, considered searching "hit men for hire," but instead killed time looking at all the unused apps I had and deleting them. Did I really need to know the value of the Swedish krona against the U.S. dollar? Delete. When was the last time I turned on white noise when trying to get to sleep? Delete.

And then I saw Voice Memos.

I'd never used that recording app, wasn't even really aware it had been on my phone all this time, so there seemed little sense in hanging on to it. But in that moment, it struck me as worth hanging on to. That maybe it might come in handy.

Ginny came rushing in without Rachel, opened a cabinet door below the sink, and was searching through a blue bin of recycled items. She came up with an empty glass jar with a spaghetti sauce label on it, metal lid still screwed on top. With a bottle opener, she made a couple of very small holes in the top, then looked at me and smirked.

"I'm not even going to ask," I said.

I went out to the front porch and found Bonnie and Marta wrapping up their chat. "If there's anything you need," Bonnie said, "you let me know."

Marta smiled. "I will, I promise. But I'm fine, really."

We headed home shortly after that. Rachel showed off what she had in the spaghetti jar: a stick-like green insect that was nearly three inches long. Ginny had told her it was a European praying mantis, the state insect of Connecticut. "He can stand on his back legs and he puts his hands together like he's praying."

I could think of a few things it could pray for.

If Bonnie was still angry with me about selling the boat, she was hiding it well. Her sister's situation had put everything else on the back burner. I gave an excellent performance of someone who had things under control, even if below the surface I was pretty much going out of my mind. And any time Bonnie observed that I seemed distracted, not quite there, she attributed it to a holdover from my LeDrew encounter.

And before we knew it, it was Monday.

Midday, when I had a free moment, I popped into the high school office. There was a counter at the entrance where you could usually find a student in crisis—couldn't get into their locker, lost a phone, thought they were going to throw up—but the teachers scooted around the end of it like they had special visas.

It wasn't often a staff member came in here looking for Trent. He was only the principal. If you really wanted some student's academic records, a contact for a parents' group, an on-call dentist who could help a kid who'd fallen and chipped a tooth, you went to Belinda. Her title was "head secretary" but that did her a disservice. A better one would be "head honcho" or "field commander" or maybe just "chief executive officer." She'd been at the school for the better part of two decades, outlasted five principals, kind of the way the Queen of England had dealt with fifteen prime ministers during her reign before passing on. Belinda, as they like to say, knew where the bodies were buried.

Trent was smart enough to know his place. "I work for Belinda," he'd told me more than once. "If there's one person you don't want to cross, it's her. She will gut you like a fish." But he'd made the comment with a wry grin, and no shortage of respect and affection.

We all loved her. She was tough and firm and I'd even heard her use a few f-bombs under her breath when things became chaotic, but beneath that thick hide was a woman who would do anything for you.

When I came around the corner and caught her eye, she said, "Hey, Richard."

"Belinda."

"How you doing?"

It was only my second day back since the incident, so many on staff were still inquiring as to my state of mind, wondering whether I was on the verge of some kind of PTSD attack.

"I've been worse," I said.

"Good to hear. Trent's out."

"Looking for you. You keep all the old yearbooks around here someplace?"

"Sure," she said, nodding toward a shelf than ran along one wall. She got up from her desk. "What year do you want?"

"Maybe 2015 through '17?"

She went to the shelf, scanned the spines, pulled out the three books I was looking for and handed them to me. "Anything else I can do for you?"

She didn't ask what I wanted them for, nor had I expected her to. Belinda had enough on her plate without getting the details on matters that were none of her concern. But that didn't mean she didn't know just about everything.

"You have any recollection of a kid named Billy Finster?" I asked.

Belinda's brain had more memory than a MacBook. She took two seconds to retrieve the data, then said, "Yes. Bit of a jock, not a great student. Always looking for shortcuts, the easy way out. Suspended once for smoking pot in the boys' bathroom. Also some health issues. Missed several weeks one year with mononucleosis, as I recall. We had a wave of it that year. And another year, a sports injury. Shoulder dislocation playing football. Played basketball, was on the wrestling team. Parents were kind of ditzy, not in the picture all that much."

"What was his shoe size?"

Belinda's mouth opened, as if she expected she would know the answer to that question, then stopped, looked at me, and said, "Wise guy."

I smiled.

Even though she hadn't asked, I felt I needed a reason to be making inquiries about a former student.

"Ran into him the other day, he came up, said hello. I couldn't quite place him, but I knew the name." I held up the books. "Was going to look through these, see if I remember him."

Belinda had gone back to her desk and dismissed me with a wave of her hand. "Enjoy."

I took the books back to my room and started going through them, starting with 2017. Billy Finster wasn't in it anywhere, which led me to think that he'd graduated the previous year.

So I went through the 2016 book. I couldn't find a headshot of him as I looked through the graduating class, but spotted a list of those absent when the profile shots were taken. Finster was on it. But I still went through the book looking at pictures of the school's various athletic teams, and found him in a couple of those, a blurry face in a cluster of others. I even found a picture taken during one of our wrestling tournaments, at an away game, and there I was, standing in the background.

There was a second shot of the team, the Lodge High crest emblazoned on an overhead banner, so obviously it had been taken on home turf. This must also have been when the regular wrestling coach was still on leave, because he wasn't there and another Lodge teacher was in his place.

Herb Willow.

I had no memory that he'd also filled in around that time. Getting Herb to coach any sports activity would be like asking a caveman to oversee a computer studies class.

Finally, I went through the 2015 book. That year, Finster had been present when the class photos were taken. He'd changed since then, which was no surprise. The Billy Finster I'd met was fuller in the face, thicker in the neck, and his hair was much shorter than it was back then, when a lot of it was hanging over the left side of his face. A decade could do that to a person, especially after their school athletic career was over. I wished I looked as good today as I had ten years ago, as I did in that shot of the wrestling tournament. A little less weight, and definitely more hair, although even then I didn't have a lot.

I wasn't sure if there was a point to this. Maybe I was hoping refreshing my memory of who Finster was when he attended Lodge would provide some further insight into who he was now. I'd struck out there, but that picture of Herb with the wrestling team was something that stuck with me.

Trent appeared in my doorway.

"Belinda says you came by."

"Yeah, but I wasn't looking for you."

He held his spot.

"Something up?" I said.

"Just wondered how it was going, after our talk Saturday."

"I don't have any news. Just... figuring out what to do." I told him, briefly, about Bonnie's sister and how her injury had overtaken other events.

He shook his head sympathetically. "One thing after another."

"Yeah."

"And there might be one more."

Christ, what now?

"I had a call from a Violet Kanin," Trent said. "You've got Andrew in your class?"

I nodded.

"She, and a few other parents, it seems, are looking to have a meeting," he said.

"About?"

Trent sighed. "What you're teaching."

My mind raced as I tried to guess what this might be about. It didn't take long. "A literary tour through a post-apocalyptic world's not Andrew's idea of a good time."

"Go figure," Trent said, and left the room.

Slowly, I bent over and touched my forehead to my desk.

Kill me now.